Gingrich the `Historian' Skips Over His Own Past: Jonathan Alter

Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Every dog has its day. With Rick
Perry and now Herman Cain felled by brain freezes, and Mitt
Romney unable to close the deal, snarling Newt Gingrich has
surged into a statistical dead heat in recent polls.

He has little money and less charm. He’s set new indoor
records in hypocrisy. He’s now connected to Freddie Mac, long
seen by Republicans as Freddy Krueger. But in this field, don’t
count him out.

Romney and Gingrich are emerging as the front-runners
because they’re brighter than their rivals and they prove it
repeatedly in the only arena that counts -- the televised
debates. We can look forward to at least 14 more episodes of the
hit show “Real Candidates” scheduled between now and March,
which means that the characters, who love the exposure, have no
incentive to drop out.

On stage, Newt, a former professor, is the testy brainiac
brandishing a butcher’s knife. He always opens by slashing the
moderators, who are stand-ins for the hated “liberal media,”
even if they work for Fox News. Then he speaks in apocalyptic,
high-flown terms meant to conjure Ronald Reagan and Winston
Churchill. Just when it gets too wonky, he shanks the other
professor in the race, the one in the White House.

Freddie Mac’s Cash

The Nov. 9 debate will be remembered as either a bump in
the road for Gingrich or the beginning of another Newtonian fall
to earth. He was asked that night what he did to earn a $300,000
payment from Freddie Mac. He answered preposterously that he was
hired as a “historian,” not a lobbyist. Then some digging by
Bloomberg News revealed he had actually made between $1.6
million and $1.8 million for doing virtually nothing.

When Gingrich said that Representative Barney Frank should
be in jail for being “close to” lobbyists at Freddie Mac in a
debate on Oct. 12, he somehow forget to mention that he had been
paid handsomely by the same organization. He loudly claims that
he warned his paymasters of the “insane” loans they were
approving. But so far he’s offered no evidence of such warnings
or that he did anything more than sing the praises of minority
home ownership and pretend he wasn’t lobbying.

Of course this is hardly the first time Gingrich has
medaled in shamelessness -- and it hasn’t stopped him yet.

Years of Shamelessness

In 1988, as a young representative, he helped drive House
Speaker Jim Wright from office for allegedly violating House
rules to profit from a book; at the same time Gingrich himself
was skirting House rules to promote his own book. A decade
later, in a separate matter involving a college course he
taught, the Republican-controlled House made Gingrich the first
speaker ever to be fined for violating House rules.

In 1989, he viciously attacked Democratic corruption at the
House bank and post office. It turned out he was among those
members overdrafting from the same House bank.

In 1994, he implied that liberals were at fault in the
Susan Smith case, in which a mother infamously drowned her
children. He later said the shootings at Columbine and Virginia
Tech stemmed from the same “situation ethics” of liberals.

In 1998, he led the fight to impeach President Bill Clinton
for the Monica Lewinsky affair while he was already five years
into an extramarital affair of his own -- with a congressional
staffer (soon to be his third wife) who was 23 years his junior.

In 2009, he called Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a
“racist” not long before he said the secret to understanding
President Barack Obama was his embrace of the radical “Kenyan
anti-colonial” mentality of his late father.

In 2011, he blasted the president for seeking the help of
the United Nations instead of just bombing Libya unilaterally.
After military action began, he said without blinking, “I would
not have intervened.”

Attack, Attack, Attack

Newt’s M.O. has been the same for three decades: I’m always
right, you’re always wrong. Throw in some futuristic talk about
nanotechnology and then attack, attack, attack. If Gingrich’s
act didn’t bear so much responsibility for our smash-mouth
politics, it would almost be amusing.

Now that he’s doing well, the other candidates will work
overtime opening Gingrich’s old baggage. They’ll remind voters
that he was critical of Representative Paul Ryan’s budget plan
and believes in climate change, among other conservative
heresies. They’ll say he’s a creature of Washington and caved to
Clinton when he was president.

But like his rivals, Newt can always count on good old
American amnesia kicking in. His game plan is to place in Iowa
and New Hampshire, then win South Carolina, which neighbors his
home state of Georgia and contains a lot of veterans, who
respond well to his bombast despite his failure to serve in the
military during the Vietnam War.

Newt is like the “New Nixon” in 1968 -- unattractive in a
general election, unsuited temperamentally for high office and
yet undaunted. Richard Nixon won that year despite his
skeletons, and Gingrich genuinely believes he will, too, after
all those Churchillian years in the wilderness. He will fight
them on the beaches! In the woods! In the lobbies!

(Jonathan Alter, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the author
of “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.” The opinions
expressed are his own.)